Affective Incongruity and the Thin Red Line

Affective Incongruity and The Thin Red Line Carl Plantinga Abstract: Most films, most of the time, are affectively unified. What I call “synesthetic affects” are orchestrated in an attempt to provide a holistic affective experience congruent with the film’s unfolding narrative and thematic concerns. Yet Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line elicits contradictory or incongruent affects, such incongruence neither being justified by genre conventions, “excess,” irony, nor stumbled upon through incompetence. The Thin Red Line elicits incongruent emotions for the purposes of generating an experience of rumination and wonder. The study of such incongruent emotions, still in its infancy, raises important methodological issues about the study of mixed emotions and the conventions for mixing affects in the cinema. Keywords: affect and film, emotion and film, film criticism, film interpretation, Malick, The Thin Red Line Viewers justifiably assume that mainstream films, most of the time, exhibit unity and singleness of purpose. Such unity requires a kind of affective fit- tingness whereby elements of style, structure, and narrative content work together to elaborate and reinforce a sequence of dominant emotions or moods—among them, for example, suspense, eager expectation, relief, or joy. Most scenes in mainstream films provide cues for fitting or congruent emotions that contribute to a consistent dramatic arc and dominant affective experience. Touch of Evil (1958), for example, couples narrative scenarios of corruption, betrayal, and death with low key lighting, night scenes, skewed and cluttered framing, and industrial settings littered with trash, oil wells, and rusting machinery. Conversely, the musical Oklahoma (1955) celebrates mar- riage, community, and the land, and uses high key lighting, balanced and sym- metrical compositions, bright colors, bucolic natural settings, and plenty of sunshine to accompany its exuberant proclamations of the goodness of life. In this article I explore a different kind of affective experience at the movies, the process by which films, in part or in whole, elicit incongruent or contradictory emotions and affects. It is not merely garden-variety mixed emotions that I explore. Mixed emotions in a film may be motivated by genre, their admixture thus becoming conventional and expected. Fear and disgust, for example, might be thought to work together congruently in the horror Projections Volume 4, Issue 2, Winter 2010: 86–103 © Berghahn Journals doi: 10.3167/proj.2010.040206 ISSN 1934-9688 (Print), ISSN 1934-9696 (Online) AFFECTIVE INCONGRUITY / 87 film, because they share the same negative valence and contribute to an overarching and unified effect, which Noël Carroll has called “art horror” (1990). My interest here is in incongruent emotions and affects, the mixture of which is not motivated by generic expectation. Using Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) as a case study, I argue that films may elicit contradictory or incongruent affects for particular thematic purposes. In the case of The Thin Red Line contradictory affect serves to facilitate, for the spectator, the questioning or rumination that also lies at the heart of the film for Witt and some of the other characters. Cross-Modal Matching and Emotional Salience In our daily lives, we are bombarded with diverse stimuli, far too much to attend to. How do we avoid sensory overload and rampant cognitive and affective confusion? J. J. Gibson (1979) holds that perception is selective, and that individuals attend to affordances, that is, to objects and events that bear salient meaning for the individual’s goals and plans. The search for affordances, usually automatic and occurring beneath the threshold of consciousness, causes us to seek out certain stimuli and ignore others. In similar terms, film scholar Joseph D. Anderson notes that this selective perception is rooted in a schema-driven encounter with our ever-changing environment. The senses evolve not in isolation but together, and work simultaneously to help us perceive our world. Perception is also multi-modal, in that schemata lead us to find invariant properties across and within sense modalities (Anderson 1996: 86–89). Cross-modal binding, or multi-modal perception, is the process by which spectators unite diverse percepts from multiple sensual channels. Cross-modal binding, both inside and outside of media consumption, is a basic perceptual and cognitive activity by which we attend to some percepts and not others, and by which perceptions are quickly unified and given meaning in relation to our goals or needs. Such binding, having been incentivized over years of evolutionary history, is pleasurable in itself. This might explain one of the pleasures of the audio-visual media, with their cross-modal presentation of sounds and images. Michel Chion calls the binding of sound and im- age in film “synchresis,” the phenomenon by which viewers unite images and sounds into an overarching perception or interpretation of a filmic event or object. Chion’s concept of “audio-vision” suggests that through cross-modal binding, seeing and hearing are mutually determinative (1994: 1–5). One example of cross-modal binding, from the world of speech perception, is the so-called McGurk effect. When seeing or hearing someone speaking, the perception of which phonemes are being spoken depends on the sensory mode by which the phonemes are perceived. Three modes are possible. The perceiver may 1) see the speaker mouthing the words but hear nothing, 2) hear but not see the words being spoken, or 3) both see and hear simultane- 88 / PROJECTIONS ously. In each of the three cases, subjects almost invariably perceive different spoken phonemes (Eysenck and Keane 200: 343). Most salient for our purposes is that the phoneme perceived by a combination of audio and visual perception is different from that perceived through either audio or visual perception in isolation. The conclusion to be drawn is that although perception occurs through discrete sensory channels, it is unified by the schema-driven perceiver. There is good reason to think that emotions and affects have an important role in this binding of experience; in other words, such binding is not just a perceptual or cognitive process but also an affective one. Thus Noël Carroll (2008: 157) has described the “searchlight function” of the emotions. When a person is in a particular emotional state—for example, fear—she or he at- tends to stimuli perceived to be threatening, rather than to the visual beauty of a nearby flower or its pleasant scent. The emotions work to facilitate attention to salient aspects of the environment, according to the emotional state of the perceiver. When experiencing wonder I am more likely to notice won- derful things, while the fearful perceiver scans the environment for signs of danger. The overarching point is that our experience is often unified and di- rected according to our goals (whether conscious and intentional, or uncon- scious and automatic), and in relation to what we take to be salient, such that we continually both interpret our experience and attend to some stimuli rather than others. The Unity of Experience in Movies In mainstream narrative films much of this work of unification is done for us, in advance. Noël Carroll calls this “criterial prefocusing” (2008: 263–264). Af- fects and emotions are coordinated for particular purposes; that is, both the events shown and their manner of presentation are designed to elicit unified, or congruent affects and emotions. When toward the end of The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is being stalked by Jamie Gumb (Ted Levine) in his dark basement, the lighting, music, facial expressions, ges- tures, body movements, shot compositions, and camera movements work together in an attempt to increase suspense about the outcome of the deadly confrontation. It is only after Clarice shoots Gumb that the window breaks, al- lowing sunlight to stream into the basement, and revealing various souvenirs and combat paraphernalia that suggest Gumb’s past as a Vietnam Veteran. The revelation of such character information is reserved for a less dramatic moment, and could have gone unnoticed earlier, while Clarice’s life was in danger and the audience was in the thralls of suspense. After Gumb’s death, however, when he no longer poses a threat, the audience may contemplate his past, and perhaps see him humanized a bit. In this way not only affects, but affect and cognition work together, and there exist conventional rules of AFFECTIVE INCONGRUITY / 89 thumb about what sorts of affects mix, and what sorts of affects elicit types of cognitive activity. Greg Smith (2003) has argued that the chief emotive effect of film is to cre- ate moods. Moods are overarching and long-lasting affects—affective organizing states—that prime the viewer for brief bursts of appropriate emotion. It is as though movies offer an experience that is cross-modally bound and affectively unified, as though movies mimic or approximate conscious experience. In part this is why observers as diverse as William James, Henri Bergson, V. F. Perkins, and Hugo Münsterberg have found movie experience to bear a strong resemblance to the stream of consciousness itself (Plantinga 2009a: 48). As author and neurologist Oliver Sacks writes, “the technical and concep- tual devices of the cinema . rather closely mimic (and perhaps are designed to mimic) the streamings and veerings of consciousness” (2004: 41). I call such an organizing state in the movies a “synesthetic affect,” drawing attention to the means by which filmmakers orchestrate congruent affects and emotions in an attempt to elicit a particular affect or mixture of congruent affects, for example feelings appropriate to shame and guilt in certain scenes in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (Plantinga 2009a: 156–166).

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